


reflections/greatest hits compilation

by imahira



Category: Lux-Pain
Genre: Gen, Meta, Originally Posted on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2020-05-07 08:19:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19205521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imahira/pseuds/imahira
Summary: Reflections on the Lux-Pain official translation after my own amateur translation of chapters 16-20.





	reflections/greatest hits compilation

**Author's Note:**

> (originally posted here on tumblr)

It should be noted that Lux-Pain didn’t outright destroy the developers; they managed to put out several more titles before folding. And, although the game is notorious for sounding like the translators “didn’t speak English”, my guess based on these last 4 chapters is that it was the opposite problem. Easily 50% of the errors come from someone not understanding what the original Japanese line is saying, and very occasionally the game throws out an English turn of phrase better than anything I could do. (My guess is the majority of the translators spoke neither Japanese nor English as a first language.)

  


Another 40% of the mistakes are from the translators not knowing who’s speaking, what’s happened in previous scenes, or anything about the game’s lore. 

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Probably only about 10% of the mistakes are bad English, and that includes things like typos that could happen to any native speaker working quickly. (I’m noticing in my screencaps that this plagues the talking-heads scenes in particular.)

* * *

  


…And other times the Japanese script is pretty clear about things like “Hibiki says he just  _saw someone_  who looks like Atsuki”, and…….. I have no idea what happened. A translator working on their 32nd hour without sleep, perhaps.

* * *

  


Not to say that there aren’t a fair number of moments that point me to a non-native English speaker: there are moments that are technically or almost correct, but “sound” wrong even beyond the usual "anime English” issues that stem from over-literal translation.

“Dieing” is… not impossible for a native speaker, but a little unusual, particularly when coupled with “espeically” and “krinkly”.

This is a correct sentence, but also a very odd way for a native English speaker to refer to Don Quixote, even if the line had to be cut down due to space issues.

This could either be a non-native speaker’s mistake, or just an editing error while changing “I felt” to “The feeling” or visa versa.

And this post was apparently translated by someone who knows “gotta” is a word, and has made the (quite logical) leap that it can replace “got a”. They also don’t know that knowledge is is an uncountable noun in English, and are pretty fuzzy on conjunctions. They seem to have handled a lot of the BBS board posts. Either they aren’t familiar with the game lore, or they’re not good with English pronouns either, which resulted in the infamous thread where everyone calls Mako “he”.

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Then there are the absolute mysteries that I was expecting to be issues with the game code itself, where the scripted line was too long and the game couldn’t display the whole thing. But… no, they’re just like that in the script files!

In the West, it has some infamy for the terrible translation and being released with a dub that doesn’t match the words onscreen, but in Japan it was just another anime-style visual novel for the DS, and seems to have faded from memory along with others of its kind. It may also have suffered from having the exact same plot twist as Persona 4, although it was actually released 4 months earlier than P4. Killaware was started by former Atlus employees, but as far as I can tell P4 didn’t start development until after they left the company.

Regardless, the game probably suffered a lot over time from having a protagonist and midgame antagonist who are very similar to Persona 4 characters, but in a game featuring 99% less actual gameplay. Still, there’s a charm to Lux-Pain, even experienced through the fog of a half-finished, often baffling English translation. …and then it hits you with a Chinese character saying “Love you long time” on the way out, so, that’s the experience!


End file.
